BS: Waaaaay UP! To Alaska....

Subject: RE: BS: Waaaaay UP! To Alaska....
From: Rapparee
Date: 29 Jun 05 - 03:55 PM

Yes, but they were confiscated by Customs where we returned to the US....

Subject: RE: BS: Waaaaay UP! To Alaska....
From: gnu
Date: 29 Jun 05 - 03:06 PM

Get any pic's?

Subject: RE: BS: Waaaaay UP! To Alaska....
From: Ebbie
Date: 29 Jun 05 - 03:00 PM

I too prize family connections. :)

Subject: RE: BS: Waaaaay UP! To Alaska....
From: Rapparee
Date: 29 Jun 05 - 02:53 PM

'Twas on the Homer Spit that we met my wife's cousin's ex-husband's second wife.

Subject: RE: BS: Waaaaay UP! To Alaska....
From: Ebbie
Date: 29 Jun 05 - 01:19 PM

To my regret I never set foot in Alaska until 1988. I understand that downtown Juneau was 'revitalized' circa 1984. Oldtimers here have seen lots of changes. We now have something like 7 banks of traffic lights. And close to 15,000 new inhabitants most summer days. Blessedly, they depart at day's end.

Speaking of Moose Pass, Rap, I watched a brown bear there. It was contentedly feeding on dandelions, like in an illustrated children's book.

We were on our way to Seward, having spent the night in Homer on the other prong of the peninsula. I liked Seward better than Homer, mostly because I like mountains and trees.

The Homer Spit is -well, interesting. After the tsunami of 1964 they rebuilt and fortified sections of it with riprap but it will inevitably be washed out again. I would not want to be on it during an earthquake.

On it is a two-lane paved road leading to mostly commercial enterprises and a couple or three remaining private homes. It's a couple miles long, I think, extended into the ocean. Very scenic, with mountains in the distance.

Subject: RE: BS: Waaaaay UP! To Alaska....
From: Rapparee
Date: 29 Jun 05 - 09:14 AM

Well, the trip we made in 1998 with my wife's parents was interesting. Pat and I flew to Anchorage, picked up a car, drove to Glenallen, then to Tok, and turned right to Beaver Creek (YT). Met her parents, drove back to Tok, then to Delta Junction, North Pole, Fairbanks, Denali, Anchorage, Homer, Kodiak, Seward, Moose Pass, Portage, Whittier, Valdez, Tok, Destruction Bay, Haines. Put them on the ferry and Pat and I drove to Border City, then to Anchorage, and flew outside.

3,625 miles on the odometer. Two countries, two Provinces, one state.

I do not recommend the Tamarck Inn in Fairbanks.

Subject: RE: BS: Waaaaay UP! To Alaska....
From: Ebbie
Date: 28 Jun 05 - 11:06 PM

Since you no longer are mushing in Alaska, and your presence is no longer so sorely needed, Rap, may I borrow your frog team? It is the only realistic hope I have of seeing the things I want. I will pay anything you ask, as long as it's reasonable in my books.

I've lived here for just past 17 years now. My brother in southern Washgington state was ill with lymphoma for many of those years and every chance I had I flew down there to be with him.

Since he died, I'm now interested in the process of breaking off bite size pieces of Alaska. I've barely gotten started but at least I have got started. This last trip introduced me to many places that had been only names to me before.

Actually, next year three of us are talking about renting a motor home and going out and about. The road system in Alaska is a severely circumscribed one but it will take me a long time to see what I can see, just from it.

But at some point I want to go to Nome, to Kotzebue, to the Pribilofs, to the Aleutians, to the North Slope, to the Alaska Range. Heck, I want to see it all. Luckily, I enjoy flying because there's lots of it coming up. (Oops. {Whoops?} That sounds like- but no.)

Subject: RE: BS: Waaaaay UP! To Alaska....
From: Bill D
Date: 28 Jun 05 - 11:02 PM

I delivered a friend's car to him in Juneau in 1975. Took the ferry up the coast, stayed for a week..(until I had eaten ALL the salmon). I have about 500 slides of that trip...ferry, islands, mist, bears, old fishing villages & logging camps, Juneau and it's highway system (at that time, couple of miles of freeway to the Mendenhall glacier), lots of old churches and other building.....and, a climb up the mountain trail above Juneau where you get amazing overviews of the town and its situation. Then on up to snowy patches above the tree line....
   However, this was August, and sunny, and humid...and I was soaking with persperation by the time I got up there.....so..*sly grin*...I have a slide of me, happily drying my clothes on a rock in the sun while I stand naked surrounded with snowy peaks! Very liberating, I must say! At the end of our stay, we put our hosts (stuffed them in their car)on a ferry for their new job in Sitka.

Then we (my ex-wife and a friend who had helped drive) flew back to Seattle from Juneau, stopping at Ketchikan International airport for 20 minutes....Now that was interesting! We are cruising along in this jetliner, above the billowing clouds with mountain peaks poking thru them, when suddenly we dive (only word that fits) into the clouds and emerge a few thousand feet above this teeny little strip of asphalt cut into the side of an island, with the great metropolis of Ketchikan huddled on the other side of a channel across from the 'airport'....we zoom down, landing on one end of the strip with all of 27 ft. to spare, screech to a stop at the OTHER end...and are towed backwards to where we touched down, as there is no room to turn a plane around....we are parked with the tail of the plane extending out over the giant rocks that we would have met if the pilot had misjudged that 27 ft., and we watch the tiny ferries bring people and cars (2 or 3 at a time!) over to the airport...then we are ready to go, and the engines rev up to HIGH, and we hurtle down the the other end of that postage stamp of a runway and ZOOM! straight up...(well...almost) and head for this totally dull landing at Seattle.

and the most amazing thing about the trip? (besides all the salmon, I mean) While browsing in a store in downtown Juneau, someone called my name, and there was a guy I had met in at an environmental conference in Iowa 5 years earlier....small world.

A week in Juneau is not exactly roughing it, or seeing the grandeur of the rest of the state, but I got 'some' feeling for history and and a notion of why folks would want to live 'up there'...

Subject: RE: BS: Waaaaay UP! To Alaska....
From: Rapparee
Date: 28 Jun 05 - 09:56 PM

Hey, I've seen all of Alaska, and you can too. It's very easy.

Subject: RE: BS: Waaaaay UP! To Alaska....
From: Alaska Mike
Date: 28 Jun 05 - 08:33 PM

As for ugly, foul tasting, tiger striped dog/chum salmon Ebbie, I've caught 'em, but never fished for them.

I don't think anyone could really say they have "seen" Alaska. It's like the group of blind men describing an elephant. They can only describe the part they feel. Alaska is 2 1/2 times the size of Texas and, if superimposed over the lower 48 would stretch from the Atlantic coast of Georgia to west of the Golden Gate bridge. We have more ocean coast than all the other United States put together. We have one of the largest rain-forests in North America and we have a huge frozen desert that gets very little precipitation at all.

Everyplace I have been has had some uniqueness in geography or vegetation or character that makes it special to be there. Northern Alaska is very bleak and barren, The Aleutian Islands are rarely bone chilling cold, but they are almost always windy and wet, the interior portion of the state has both the hottest and coldest temperatures found up here. We have more than 3 million lakes of 20 acres or larger and we have more active glaciers than anywhere else on earth.

We have no state income tax, no state sales tax, no city sales tax in Anchorage, and we still receive an annual dividend check from the state for our share of the oil wealth that is produced. Last year it amounted to over $900 for each man, woman and child that resides here. There is no place I would have rather raised my five children. Alaska is my home and I love it here.

Mike

Subject: RE: BS: Waaaaay UP! To Alaska....
From: gnu
Date: 28 Jun 05 - 05:45 PM

We should have been able to read about your exploits, Rap, instead of being forced, as young Canadian school children, to read "As the Sparrow Falls". He did not treat his dogs as well as you did... enough said. I know all the Canucks out there know of the foul deed of which I speak.

And THEN, what happened?

Subject: RE: BS: Waaaaay UP! To Alaska....
From: Ebbie
Date: 28 Jun 05 - 04:45 PM

Oh that everyone would take such good care of their steeds. It's a rare 'un. By the way, I realize that the dogs were able to pull only their own supplies. I appreciate more than I can say that on your own sturdy back you piled the rest. Wish I had known you then.

Eb

Subject: RE: BS: Waaaaay UP! To Alaska....
From: katlaughing
Date: 28 Jun 05 - 04:44 PM

Skinny Dick grew large?**bg**

Subject: RE: BS: Waaaaay UP! To Alaska....
From: Rapparee
Date: 28 Jun 05 - 04:44 PM

Yup, we stopped here for the night. After unsaddling the dogs, I had a beer and went to bed.

Subject: RE: BS: Waaaaay UP! To Alaska....
From: gnu
Date: 28 Jun 05 - 04:00 PM

And, THEN what happened.

Subject: RE: BS: Waaaaay UP! To Alaska....
From: Rapparee
Date: 28 Jun 05 - 03:47 PM

Balto was a fraudo. MY dogs were named Spot, Fido, Rover, (the wheel dogs); Ginger, Piddles, (the hub-and-axle dogs); Beans, (the tail gunner); Jack, Fang, Geoffrey, Humper, Marcia (the transfer case dogs, except for Marcia, who was the doggy good-time girl), and my lead dog, Heraclitus. We carried over 600 kgs. of dried dog salmon for them, and needed all of it; we also had to shoot four moose, seventeen caribou, and a pika to keep the dogs fed.

This was in addition to the gear I needed to survive: A small tent, a blanket, an axe, a simple cooking pot, a microwave oven, twelve hundred miles of extension cord, a snow machine, three hundred gallons of gasoline, a television, a bathtub/shower combination, and, of course, a couple tons of food and drink, the family plate.

Of course, I took suitable clothing -- tough clothes to withstand the rigors of the trail, informal evening attire, a swimming suit or two for the hot springs along the way, things like that. I didn't feel that formal evening attire would be necessary, and I also left my court sword at home.

Oh, yes. Fifteen vials of diptheria serum. A sextant. An astrolabe. A gyroscope. Redundant cyclotrons. And a few other things.

It was nearly noon when we left Eek. The snow was snowing fiercely, and the dogs strained at their traces. We stopped almost at once, for one of the dogs had developed a hernia, but when we had cut him out of harness we were able to simply FLY along the trail to Nome. We stopped the first night at Skinny Dick's place, and I stabled, curried, and fed the dogs before having my own supper.

Subject: RE: BS: Waaaaay UP! To Alaska....
From: Ebbie
Date: 28 Jun 05 - 02:05 PM

I've heard some amazing bits of information too. Once I was on a tour bus and as we paused outside the SOB (State Office Building) the driver said confidently into his microphone: "You wouldn't think to look at it but 16,000 people work in that building."

Seated way back where I couldn't do more than yelp, I about choked. 160 offices, each with 100 people? 100 offices, each with 160 people? 16,000 office workers in a community of 30,000 people? I have no idea what he was trying to say. Even a 1600 figure would be grossly inflated.

Please do tell us of your serum run, Rap. Did you have any dogs other than Balto? And how is the dear old fellow these days? :)

Subject: RE: BS: Waaaaay UP! To Alaska....
From: Rapparee
Date: 28 Jun 05 - 01:31 PM

My figure of 72 miles of road was premised upon what I was told by a car rental agent in Juneau in 1987 or 88, I forget which. It wasn't necessarily linear (probably not; it was Ugly Duckling Rent-a-Car).

I'll tell the story of delivering the serum when I get a chance. Things have been kinda hectic.

Subject: RE: BS: Waaaaay UP! To Alaska....
From: gnu
Date: 28 Jun 05 - 12:51 PM

Coool.

Subject: RE: BS: Waaaaay UP! To Alaska....
From: Ebbie
Date: 28 Jun 05 - 12:05 PM

That brings up a question a group of us were discussing the other day, Mike- Has anyone seen all of Alaska? I realize that no one has seen and experienced everything anywhere, but many of us have hiked and driven or traveled by various means through a number of states, enough so we can say with confidence: That is what BLANK is like.

Can anyone say that of Alaska? Other than: Over there it is cold, over there are a lot of trees, over there it is flat and over there are massive mountains. You get the idea. You have probably traveled more in Alaska than most - except maybe for itinerant nurses. And a friend of mine some time back when he was working for DEC spent a year flying around inspecting oil tanks.

BTW, only four species of salmon, Mike? I imagine you have the same species we have: The king, the silver, the red, the pink and the chum. Or said another way: The Chinook, the Coho, the Sockeye, the Humpy, the Dog.

gnu, unless you count driveways, we in Juneau don't have 72 miles of roads. If you start at the end of the road in Thane community and go nominally north to the end of the road in Juneau proper, you've gone 46 miles. Add the 12-mile road on Douglas Island which adds upt to 58. Add the five or so miles up the mountain to the ski area and the half mile Douglas Bridge and we're still short.

Of course we actually have more road surfaces than that, but linearly speaking, my figures are fairly accurate.

Subject: RE: BS: Waaaaay UP! To Alaska....
From: Alaska Mike
Date: 28 Jun 05 - 09:59 AM

Alaska is BIG!!! Air travel is the way we get around up here as our road system only covers about 25% of the state. Some of the trips from my home in Anchorage have been pretty expensive, $1,000 round trip to Dutch Harbor, $1,400 round trip to St. Paul Island, $1,800 round trip to Adak. Fortunately, I work for the state and they pay for my travel.

I've lived and worked up here for nearly 20 years. I've been to almost every place that has a fish cannery, construction project or environmental clean up campaign from Ketchikan to Kotzebue. I've worked in -60 degree weather with wind chills of below -100 F.

I've seen eagles, whales, bears (black, brown, white and blue), wolverine, caribou, moose, lynx, fox, mink, eiders, muirs, swans, geese, ptarmigan, owls, seals, sea lions, sharks, musk ox, and many others. I've fished for pike, cod, rockfish, trout, burbot, halibut and four different species of salmon.

I have written songs and sung them at festivals and events in Anchorage, Fairbanks, Juneau, Sitka, Eagle River, Soldotna, Kenai, Kodiak, Seldovia, Palmer, Wasilla, Denali, Talkeetna, Cantwell, Willow, Dutch Harbor, Dillingham, Nome, Haines and odd places in between.

And despite all my travels and all the places I've been, I have only seen a very small part of the 49th state. I can't wait to see the rest of it.

Mike

Subject: RE: BS: Waaaaay UP! To Alaska....
From: Rapparee
Date: 28 Jun 05 - 09:20 AM

I would tell you about mushing into the Wrangel-Mt. St. Elias mountains with the diptheria serum one winter, but I have to go get ready for work. I have to see someone before I go to a meeting with the Mayor at 9, too. But the temperature was -77 F. when I started and that was the high for the week. The dogs died and I had to continue on foot, in snow eight feet deep and me without snowshoes. But I knew that Nome was depending upon me.

Subject: RE: BS: Waaaaay UP! To Alaska....
From: gnu
Date: 28 Jun 05 - 06:20 AM

Imagine if you had that one on video, Rap! Ebbie... ain't that just when batteries would go? I hope you got a copy from your friend.

Rap said 72 miles of road around Juneau in 88> Hoe extensive is the road system where you recently vacationed, Ebbie?

Subject: RE: BS: Waaaaay UP! To Alaska....
From: Dead Horse
Date: 28 Jun 05 - 04:30 AM

There is a rumour going round that the US Coastguard are actually painting large white blobs on trained (but now mostly redundant) anti-submarine dolphins, purely to attract tourists :-)

Subject: RE: BS: Waaaaay UP! To Alaska....
From: Ebbie
Date: 28 Jun 05 - 02:27 AM

Orcas are so beautiful, painted with a meticulous hand, glowing velvety black right next to precise white, a yin yang kind of thing. One time I had joined an excursion boat on an all day jaunt to Tracy Arm, a fjord south of Juneau.

On the way back we were joined by a pod of orca, five or six of them. We slowed our speed and they stayed with us. The male (much taller dorsal fin) from time to time went under us and popped up on the other side as we all traveled along. They were having a good time, and so did we.

Another time I went to Tracy Arm and saw something totally different. As we idled there on the water in front of South Sawyer Glacier, our engines cut, I suddenly saw a face in the glacier wall. A giant brooding Indian face, complete with parka and wolf ruff. It was astonishing.

My camera batteries had died so I got a friend to take its picture. She did, somewhat blindly, because she didn't see the face. After the photo was developed she was amazed at the picture.

I went back about two weeks later to see if the face was still there. It wasn't, of course. Glaciers calve around the clock so nothing is static.

Later I went back into the excursion company and asked if anyone had reported a face in the Glacier. The woman said, Oh, yes- you mean the Santa Claus?

Humph.

Subject: RE: BS: Waaaaay UP! To Alaska....
From: Rapparee
Date: 27 Jun 05 - 10:12 PM

The fiddle in the middle of the muddle, of course.

Okay. The first time I went to Alaska my wife and I flew into Juneau (this was in 1987 or 88, I don't remember which). Anyway, we visited Mendenhall Glacier and stuff and were in town for the 4th of July. This was the year they dedicated the monument to USS Juneau, the one that went down in Ironbottom Sound. The current Juneau, an assault ship was in town for the dedication and we got to tour her. We watched the parade, including watching the icefield research team, all roped together, pop into the Red Dog Saloon when the parade paused and left them in front of the doors.

From Juneau we ferried to Skagway, from Skag to Sitka, Sitka to Ketchikan, Ketchikan to Petersburg, and then back to Juneau and we flew home.

I learned that fireworks at midnight in Alaska don't elicit the ohs and ahs they do when the sky is actually dark. I learned not to fall into the middle of a pod of orcas (if you want REAL rejection, fall into the middle of a pod of orcas and have them toss you back on the boat). I learned that the best way to get around in that part of the state is by Blue Canoes (for one thing, you can't drive anywhere from Juneau -- there's only 72 miles of road). I learned why there is (or was) a big eye above Juneau. And I learned that the Fiddlehead is a damned good restaurant, and that Alaskan Amber is damned good beer.

That was my first trip to Alaska. I enjoyed it, after I got back on the boat.

Subject: RE: BS: Waaaaay UP! To Alaska....
From: Ebbie
Date: 27 Jun 05 - 09:47 PM

Hahhaha You guys. Tales that are taller than average are welcome. However, when you have lived up here for a number of years you become aware that "tall" tales are not necessarily untrue. Like a musician friend of mine who lost his violin in its case to the tide... I do wonder where that fiddle ended up.

Subject: RE: BS: Waaaaay UP! To Alaska....
From: gnu
Date: 27 Jun 05 - 07:14 PM

Haven't a clue... all I did was swim... why did you wait for two days to tow it back to shore?

Subject: RE: BS: Waaaaay UP! To Alaska....
From: Rapparee
Date: 27 Jun 05 - 07:12 PM

Who do you think dove underneath and pushed it back up and then towed it to shore?

Subject: RE: BS: Waaaaay UP! To Alaska....
From: gnu
Date: 27 Jun 05 - 07:10 PM

I knew I wasn't alone. Were you there when the float plane tipped and started to sink in the lake near the forest fire in northern PQ?

Subject: RE: BS: Waaaaay UP! To Alaska....
From: Rapparee
Date: 27 Jun 05 - 07:07 PM

Same thing happened to me!

Subject: RE: BS: Waaaaay UP! To Alaska....
From: gnu
Date: 27 Jun 05 - 06:37 PM

Got a PM... put up or shut up. Okay.

I was in Nain, Labrador... surveyed, designed and laid out the airstrip. One evening, the lads went back for supper at 6:30PM but I stayed to fish. It was a beautiful evening. The water was "flat oily ca'm". I worked my way out on the large boulders to a good spot and caught four excellent Char, all around 30".

I was so engrossed in the char that I didn't notice the tide. Nain is thirteen miles "inland" though a maze of islands, so, when the tide rises, it is delayed until the head raises the sea level at the shore in Unity Bay about one foot every thirty minutes at the end of the cycle.

So, I am about 80 feet from shore when I see this large dorsal fin sticking out of the water and going across in front of me about 100 feet away. I was in awe. What majesty, what a sight, what the f***?! The ripples from whaterever it was hit my feet. When I looked down, I was about ankle deep. I turned and looked back toward the shore. No more boulders, just water, and the sun was glancing off it. I had no idea how the hell I had got there as the water had risen about a foot and a half while I was fishing.

I swished my fishing rod around until I hit a boulder and I jumped to it. I repeated this, with the four char slung over my shoulder, until I was on shore... shaking like a leaf. Yup, I shook like a babe in the cold for at least a half hour... one of the few times in my life when I was SCARED shitless.

Now, I have no idea if I was in any danger, but, I still shake a bit when I think about swishing that fishing rod around for boulders while those char were dripping blood into the water where something well over thirty feet long was swimming (maybe laughing).

Subject: RE: BS: Waaaaay UP! To Alaska....
From: gnu
Date: 27 Jun 05 - 06:07 PM

SOB! Get me all horned up for a stooooory and then say "Nah"? WTF is that? SPILL!

Subject: RE: BS: Waaaaay UP! To Alaska....
From: Rapparee
Date: 27 Jun 05 - 05:06 PM

Yeah. And I'm going to Juneau, Sitka, Ketchikan, Skagway, Whitehorse and other places at the end of July/first half of August. And I told Ebbie that.

I've been to Destruction Bay, Beaver Creek, Border City, Tok, Glenallen, Haines, Skagway, Wrangel, Denali, Seward, Kodiak and even the Kluane Wilderness area.

Shall I tell of my adventures? Of the temperatures in Fairbanks? Of the icepack on the way (by ship) to Valdez? Of traveling the White Pass Trail? Of frostbitten fingers and of the dogs 'round in a ring, snapping the chunks of frozen salmon out of the air as we tossed them? Of the moose, the brown bears, the salmon, the mountain goats, the musk oxen? Of the earthquake and of surviving the "sudden landing" of the small bush plane? Of the summit of Denali, with the snow encircling it like a coronet of diamonds the brow of a fair one?

Nah.

Subject: BS: Waaaaay UP! To Alaska....
From: gnu
Date: 27 Jun 05 - 04:19 PM

I have been waiting for Ebbie's Alaskan Adventure thread for an eternity... okay, a few days. Anyway, she DID say in another thread that she would gladly share her nothern travel tales and she even said she would check with others who have travelled the land of the midnight sun to see if a thread would be something to which they might contribute. I think Ebbie's just too reserved and lady-like to start such a thread, soooo...

I hope I am not being too bold in "pushing" any of you 'Cats, especially Ebbie, by starting this thread, but I recall listening to my Uncle Chic's tales of working in the NWT's in the 40' and 50's with utter fascination. I worked in Labrador on airport construction as a young man... the scenery, the ruggedness, the vastness, the wildlife, the fishing, the solitude... even the damn flies... yeees b'y, big as yer t'umb.

Sooooo... anyone got any tales or even pics of the great north? Anyone travelled around in, say, Nunavit, Labrador, Iceland, Yukon, ALASKA lately?